25/06/2026
New Article about our work.Thank you Scene Home..
For Mohamed Tantawi, these questions began forming during his university years. While studying Urban Planning in the years surrounding Egypt's 2011 revolution, he found himself feeling disconnected from the projects he was being asked to design. One of the first assignments given to students after classes resumed post-uprising, was the redevelopment of Tahrir Square, framed through the lens of tourism. For Tantawi, it felt detached from the social realities that had just unfolded in the square itself.
This feeling followed him into his graduation project. While many of his classmates designed large-scale luxury resorts, Tantawi focused instead on creating housing for the workers who would ultimately inhabit and sustain these environments. He proposed low-rise buildings inspired by human-scale communities rather than the towers that dominated many of the other submissions.
"From that moment, I realised that there are two worlds in architecture," Tantawi tells SceneHome. "There is a world that serves the mainstream, and there is another world which rarely gets addressed."
Yet despite working with one of humanity's oldest building materials, he claims, "traditional building is connected to the past, but vernacular is connected to time and place." This distinction defines Mud Studio’s philosophy. While traditional architecture often looks backwards, vernacular architecture responds to the realities of a specific environment. "My interest is not in copying old building techniques," says Tantawi. For him, the appeal of building with earth extends beyond aesthetics because it addresses multiple needs simultaneously. It provides thermal comfort, lowers construction costs, creates visually distinctive spaces, and evokes a sense of familiarity that many contemporary buildings struggle to achieve.
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